And JR’s demand that the Chinese post must hand over the letters it failed to deliver some years ago is deadlocked, too. JR suggests that the Chinese post sends him some copies of those old letters for his convenience. Actually, that should be much easier to do than to make Yuanmingyuan sculpture replicas.

In turn for the copies, the Chinese postal service can have these two heads:

JR's Replicas

Always ready to contribute to the deepening and strengthening of international friendship between the peoples of the world:

At first glance anyway, it looks like a re-iteration of issues that aren’t defined or stipulated for the first time. China’s central government published its first working plan on human rights on Monday. Its scope is from 2009 to 2010, and is reportedly a response to the United Nations’ call in 1993 to establish human rights plans.

Details can be found on the China Radio International website, but I don’t want to leave it there without quoting a very tangible regulation:

Besides, the plan contains a number of economic development items (as papers on human rights in China usually do):

– To create 18 million new jobs for urban workers while helping 18 million rural laborers move to cities and towns to find jobs by 2010;

– To increase net annual income of some 800 million rural residents by 6 percent from the 4,761 yuan (696 U.S. dollars) recorded in 2008;

– To have more than 223 million people covered by the urban basic old-age pension insurance, 400 million people covered by basic medical care insurance, 120 million covered by unemployment insurance, and 140 million covered by workers’ compensation insurance;

– To provide safe drinking water for 60 million rural residents;

– To invest more than 2 billion yuan to help areas inhabited by ethnic minorities to accelerate economic and social development.